What kills drives
To illustrate the dangers of knowing too much trivia, a hard drive in a company Dell Latitude D600 died on me today across a reboot to install Fedora 8. I’m quite certain that it happened because an hour previously I applied “hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda“, about which I’ve read in . Before today, the drive worked for 3.5 years and accumulated about 1,300,000 duty cycles.
In my defense, the sound the drive made when parking was annoying and the two-second delay every time Firefox wanted to move a RAM page to swap was irritating, so I was somewhat justified in my attempt to make my life more convenient. Also, my (newer) Dell Inspiron 1501 appears to be none the worse after a treatment with -B 254, so…